Just Yesterday

Your pain
Or any pain
Isn’t worth any more
Than the words we can dig up to describe it

Tell me of the knife
But make it pretty
Tell me of the collar bone reaching out through the skin like a branch
But make it soft

Everyone wants us to spill
Poetically
In a way that goes down
Easy

We all want to speak of maps by referring to their borders
And not by what’s inside of them

I dreamt you still, named
I dreamt you, naked
I dreamt you leaking from the knife’s advances
I dreamt you syphoning out your own life through the needle
I dreamt your spine crumbling like a palace of cards
I dreamt your heart lying down on the mat and curling into the sound of the bell
And the heat of the lights

I dreamt every dead person I know is the same
And lived in the same cramped alley of my skull
I’ll tell you these stories
Until the words materialize and I can stop up a wound

I know
I might as well try to gather rain with a sieve
But goddammit, I need to try

I’ve been walking around with a fist-full of consonants
Believing the dead are like windows
This poem, and other poems, a handful of rocks
I want to shatter each of your faces
Or family
Or friends
Like you might walk out from behind those gaps in your smiles

Sometimes, I hold the word to my ear like a conch shell
Sometimes, I curse the ocean for what it cannot or will not say
I surround these bodies with sentence after sentence
The words chant like a crowd
The words become music
The words become an orchestra of flies

I almost believe you will wake up
All of you, together
I almost believe your name will slither its way back into your body
And you will kick back to life
Like a junkyard cut list
You will walk out of your own funerals, laughing

How absurd
This choir of weeping
These caskets planted in the dirt like seeds
It is so cold in this winter’s lexicon
This language of nothing
Of once was
Or never will be again

Sometimes I want to kill my uncle for being a more miserable drunk than I was
Sometimes I want him to die already so I can write about it
Sometimes I too want to be a poem
I don’t want to be this pain
With the language used to unearth it

Sometimes I curse archeologist for telling us basic tools
Telling us basic things
Sometimes I think scientists are lazy
I too could dig a heart out of the chest
What do you any of you know about pulling the history out of a body without killing it

Just yesterday scientists discovered a new ligament in the human knee
Just yesterday I found out I can’t sleep for a whole new set of reasons
Just yesterday I wrote
And wrote
And kept writing
Because I’ve committed to not killing anyone
Especially myself
Just yesterday I found new ways to say "I miss you"
My god, how I miss you all